Israel mourns the loss of a hero as first astronaut returns home

Family, political leaders pay tribute to war veteran who died on space shuttle

February 11, 2003|By Peter Hermann | Peter Hermann,SUN FOREIGN STAFF

LOD AIR FORCE BASE, Israel - Near the end of the space shuttle Columbia's ill-fated mission, American astronaut David Brown sent a short e-mail to the wife and children of his Israeli crewmate, Ilan Ramon.

Moved that Ramon had honored his Jewish religion by flying into space with a Torah scroll smuggled out of a Nazi concentration camp, Brown noted the contrast between the volatile world they had left behind and the peaceful world they saw below.

"I was stunned that such a beautiful planet could harbor such bad things," Brown wrote the Ramon family the day before the shuttle broke apart Feb. 1, killing the seven astronauts aboard.

Ramon's 15-year-old son Assaf read the note yesterday during a formal tribute to the 48-year-old Air Force colonel and Israel's first astronaut, whose remains arrived here from the United States yesterday afternoon.

Family, friends, diplomats, political leaders and 15 NASA representatives filled a cavernous airplane hangar near Ben-Gurion International Airport to mourn the loss of the easy-going and handsome fighter pilot who became Israel's ambassador to the world and the sky above it.

They watched in solemn silence as eight pilots carried the flag-draped casket to the front and set it against a blue wall painted with the American and Israeli flags, a picture of the Earth from space and a phrase from the Bible: "On the heavens above and the earth below."

Assaf, the eldest of four children, slowly recited Brown's message in English, to preserve the exact words, while his mother, Rona, translated it into Hebrew. The youngster wore his father's blue NASA jacket, his father's name stitched on the breast pocket.

A hard rain pounded against the hangar's metal roof, an Air Force colonel wailed a sorrowful song on a saxophone and a children's choir sang a song that parents once used to console their children going off to war:

"Look after the world, lad, with the smile of angels," one stanza goes. "Look after the world, lad, because we can do it no longer."

Yesterday's public tribute, broadcast live on television, was to be the only way for a nation of mourners to pay their final respects to a man who had brought joy to a troubled land, only to perish in tragedy, an all too familiar ending for Israelis.

Ramon will be laid to rest today in a private ceremony in the northern coastal community of Moshav Nahalal, in a cemetery near a base where Ramon commanded F-16 fighter jets and where the Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan is buried.

Ramon's space voyage had given weary Israelis a welcome respite from the daily chaotic routine of death, economic woes and talk of war in Iraq. He was a national hero, an example of Israeli perseverance and a demonstration that this small, evolving nation could stand with the rest of the world.

The son of Holocaust survivors, Ramon embodied all that Israel reveres in its citizens. He was a veteran of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and fought in the 1982 war in Lebanon, and was among the pilots who bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981, setting back Iraq's nuclear program. Though not religious, he embraced the nature of the Jewish state by eating kosher meals and reciting traditional prayers aboard Columbia.

"His image, projected from above, was the reflection of Israel at its best, Israel as we would have liked to see it, the Israel we love," Sharon said. "On his last mission he soared higher than any other Israeli and realized his dream."

Israeli President Moshe Katsav said Ramon helped save the world by bombing the Iraqi reactor and became a citizen of the world by flying into space.

He read a letter that Ramon had written as he soared high above Jerusalem: "I saw Jerusalem, and this time it was the best," the letter says. "From space, the entire world opens like a unit without boundaries. Let us work for peace and a better life for all mankind."